Can't right click on desktop

I can't right click on either the desktop or within Windows Explorer. Either
way Windows Explorer hangs, stops working and restarts without me ever seeing
the right click menu. Any ideas what's going on?

A recently installed program may have added an item to your context menu,
and it's not working out too well. Check to see if the program has the
option to remove the context menu item. If not, I would uninstall the
program.

See "Method 2" here.

Right-click is slow or weird behavior caused by context menu handlers:
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/slowrightclick.htm

the shellexview utility worked for me. I went one by one thru the
context menu "type", disabling each until I discovered a Roxio Creator
10 extension that was the problem...years ago Roxio 7 left remnants
after an uninstall so they still cause problems...thanks mucho